[thrower123]

I have to disagree as strongly as I can. Vacuum up as much as you can, as quickly as you can. Breadth has a depth all it's own. If you narrow in on a handful of "great works" you're not going to get the references and implicit and explicit callbacks to other works, or understand the context of where it sits in relation to the rest of the canon. There are just too damned many good books out there not to sample as wide a selection of them as you can.

[Juliate]

Depends where you want to spend your time: on substance or on volume.

Either way, your lifetime will never be enough to cover everything.

[ThouYS]

Exploration and Exploitation, as so often. If you explore much, you'll also learn more likely which books are worth diving into. (Or go for readers digest and similar stuff and then read the real book if the summary is any good)

[jemorya]

I was about to post the same view (though I hadn't bumped into Exploration vs Exploitation before).

One year I decided to blow through as many books as I could, and the next year I took my time and re-read the interesting ones much more closely. If I hadn't spend the previous year getting through as many as I could, I wouldn't have found even half of the interesting ones.

There is a middle ground between consuming as much as possible and carefully reading every book.